As I’ve been working my way through the Hyperlinked Library course site and reading, I can feel myself becoming overwhelmed with all the information. And while I know that @michael said “do not feel overwhelmed,” sometimes I just can’t turn it off. Overwhelmed is my default. The interesting thing about this feeling, however, is that it’s not about the workload or the class itself, as daunting and challenging as those do seem at times, it’s about all the thoughts and ideas I’m getting about the “what’s” and “how’s” and “why’s” of librarianship. I see so many ideas and want to get started implementing them all right away. I’m learning that change is necessary and powerful, but it also takes time.
A Little Background to Set the Stage
Avon Public Library, Avon, MA
I’ve been working in public libraries for a little over 11 years now, and while that isn’t a considerably long time, I’ve seen quite a few changes and faced some very interesting challenges over those years. I’m currently working as a technical services librarian in a small public library in a town of around 4700 people. Last month our library director decided to move on to a new library and her departure has prompted me to consider applying to be her replacement, a career path I never would have thought myself interested in before.
My reasoning for considering this change in my career trajectory is that I want to have more involvement in creating a transparent and participatory atmosphere in the library. Over the past four years or so, I’ve seen the staff at my library suffer from boredom and an intense need to get away from the public facing areas. As it is right now, we have three circulation staff members (remember we’re a very small library) and each one of them seems to count down the minutes until the part of their shift when they’re “off desk.” I see this as an administrative failure when library staff don’t want to spend their time assisting and interacting with our patrons. As Casey and Stephens write, transparency can be simple but it “requires commitment from administrators and staff,” (2007) and I haven’t seen that commitment in my library at all.
How to Bring About Transparency and Staff Buy-In
In his book Wholehearted Librarianship: Finding Hope, Inspiration, and Balance, @michael encourages us to dream at our library jobs. He says: “we have the potential to be the leaders as we all move towards a seamless information and knowledge environment” (Stephens, 2019). This is something that I would hope to foster in the staff at my library: that desire to dream about what we can do and how we can connect with our community. I know people have thoughts and ideas and I know we all talk about those things with each other, with the hope that someday we could implement different services and programs. We need to work on how to get from talking about it to doing it. Casey and Stephens offer a “to do” list of transparency in their article “A Road Map to Transparency,” that includes things such as cross-training staff, encouraging new ideas, and getting all departments to work together when planning projects (2007). I believe that these tools would give our staff who see their library work as just a job, and not a career or a service to the community, new meaning to their daily routine. We can change the culture of the library by giving each staff member something more to focus on and a reason to interact with the people who walk through our doors.
Inclusion is small but powerful aspect of transparency.
There are so many different aspects to transparency and so many different ideas that I see that could be immensely beneficial to my small library and its community. Things like adopting a “user-driven policy” to get a better feel for not only what our users actually want, but what they might not know they need, getting all staff out into the front lines to see how the daily interactions with the patrons really work, and being more open to change by saying “yes” more often than saying “no.” All of these ideas will work to bring the staff into a more cohesive and unified group that is not working against each other, but towards a common goal of creating a transparent and participatory library space.
The Avon Public Library went fine free in 2022
My Focus
For this class, I hope to focus my study on transparency and how that can benefit small public libraries. Our daily operations might be significantly different than that of a bustling, dynamic, city library, but we are just as vital. I might argue that in some ways we are even more vital in a small community than a library in a big city, where there are a multitude of different resources for the community. In a small suburban community the library can become a hub for information and learning outside of the more structured classroom setting; it might be the only place the community has to discover resources. This is why it’s vital that we connect with our users and foster an environment from within that encourages open communication and a willingness to work with our patrons and town leaders to bring about change.
References:
Avon Public Library. https://www.facebook.com/avonpubliclibrary
Baldwin Public Library. (n.d.). Career path graphic. https://baldwinpl.org/career-path-graphic/
Casey, M. and Stephens, M. (2007, December 15). Check your ego at the door. Tame the Web. https://tametheweb.com/2008/07/01/check-your-ego-at-the-door/
Casey, M. and Stephens, M. (2007, December 15). Going to the field. Tame the Web. https://tametheweb.com/2007/09/15/going-to-the-field/
Casey, M. and Stephens, M. (2007, December 15). A road map to transparency. Tame the Web. https://tametheweb.com/2007/12/15/a-road-map-to-transparency/
Casey, M. and Stephens, M. (2007, December 15). Six more signposts. Tame the Web. https://tametheweb.com/2007/09/15/going-to-the-field/
Casey, M. and Stephens, M. (2007, December 15). Six signposts on the way. Tame the Web. https://tametheweb.com/2008/11/15/six-signposts-on-the-way/
Casey, M. and Stephens, M. (2007, December 15). Turning “no” into “yes”. Tame the Web. https://tametheweb.com/2008/11/15/six-signposts-on-the-way/
Stephens, M. T. (2020). Wholehearted librarianship : finding hope, inspiration, and balance. ALA Editions.